Meetup Recap: Travana on December 8th 2016!

Thank you for joining us on December 8th at Travana in San Francisco - we had a great time, hope you did too! Here's a quick recap:

- Travana provided us with an amazing spread of food and drinks (thank you again!)

- Sergei Burkov, Founder and CEO of Alterra.ai, a Deep Learning / NLP startup, building bots for online travel spoke about virtual travel agents powered by artificial neural networks. Sergei described the rise of bots and what it means for the travel space, and where the opportunities are. He talked about how Deep Learning is utilized for building smart conversational bots and compared them with less intelligent bots that rely on on-screen buttons.

- Stephen Grabowski, Product Manager with Skyscanner who is currently advising teams working on chatbots and conversations products spoke about Skyscanner's experience building a booking chatbot for flights, what works and what doesn't.

- Michal Wroczynski, CEO and co-founder of Fido AI spoke about how bots are the ultimate solution for solving the paradox of choice in hospitality and travel? He opened up the questioned of whether AI would change the way users learn directly from reviews.